xkcd_timefandomcom-20200216-history
The Madness (2 A.T.)
This article is about The Madness in 2 A.T. (2015 C.E.) For other Madnessen, see The Madness The Madness is an annual event where the the mods go mad and the forum becomes weird for a few days. In 2015, it was announced on the Timeversary, 25 March. The filtering started on the 5th of April, during newpix 17921. The filtering stopped on the 8th of April, during newpix 17998. Pre-Existing Filters These filters existed prior to the announcement of the Madness: '' New Filters in 2 A.T. ''Filters that were in effect for this year's Madness Note: all punctuation filters apply only when the marks are in isolation, not when next to words. ''Contractions/Abbreviations This year the letters "i" and "m" were each filtered separately. Since the fora software regards a contraction as two separate words split by punctuation, sometimes the results were unexpected. Three days into the Madness, several small articles and prepositions were added to the list including the letter "a". Post-Madness Filters 'These filters remained in effect after the Madness: ''' Other Madness Effects ''The Empinkening In previous years, one could apply to the group FF00BF BFFs before the Madness hit and experience special effects of the Madness, most notably username turning a hot pink color. This year, that group became known as The Wee Free Men (characters that appear in Terry Prachett's books) and started "recruiting" all active members of the fora, using a thread in Forum Games to keep score. While many OTTers adopted the shared avatar of The Wee Free Men, some chose to empinken their own avatars. (Expand to view.) Raptorcat Attacks After three rounds of recruiting new members to the empinkened Wee Free Men, the game changed to posting pictures of raptorcats (called "certainly-not-panthers" in the game thread) immediately after a poster who had been empinkened but had not adopted the standard group avatar. One raptorcat was required for every thousand posts the target had, and the attacker gained points equivalent to the post total of the target. ++Symbol Not Found++ A particularly mustardy filter this Madness was one that changed any word containing the letter Q, X, Y, or Z into the phrase ''++Symbol Not Found++. It made the fora nigh-unreadable for about an hour on April 8th (np17994 to np17995). Because of the letter Q it affected all quote tags on the fora, including those in signatures. Because of the letter X it affected every mention of xkcd. And because of the letter Y the filter became recursive, turning ++Symbol Not Found++ into ++++Symbol Not Found++ Not Found++ ''and so on. The Librarian and other HODOResque pranks Similar to the wild card character (*) prank from two years ago that changed everything to HODOR (see The Madness, 0 A.T. ), wild cards were used to affect all words on the fora several times beginning on the second day of the Madness. Usually the span of each change would last only a minute or two. Occurrences of this continued even after the general filters were switched off at np17998. The ''ooks ''and ''eeks ''are in reference to the Librarian in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, who after being turned into an orangutan spoke mostly in ''ooks ''and ''eeks. The phrase GNU Terry Pratchett at the conclusion of the filtering was in honor of his memory. Reactions to the Madness ''The "Wee Free Men" Game Post-Madness, the empinkening and raptorcat attacks done by the FF00BF BFFs, and the thread run by Azrael, were generally regarded as a positive way to encourage inter-fora participation (particularly when contrasted to the thread lock in the Madness before). During the Madness, the group name "FF00BF BFFs" was changed by a wordfilter to "The Wee Free Men". To play the game, an FF00BF or "captured" forumite would usually have to search for "recruits" or "victims" in several different fora, and post to capture them in places they might not otherwise have posted. A newly "captured" forumite needed to figure out some of the rules, and during part of the game needed to have a suitable avatar (typically empinkened and with the Wee Free Men theme) to be able to "capture" another. The Great Enlimening'' When the pink usernames were finally removed from the Wee Free Men, mrob27 encouraged OTTers to "en-lyme-ify" Newpage 2287 since the empinkening had finished; the encouragement was repeated on Newpage 2288. Manips, icons, and OTTercomics were posted in response, and again OTTers changed their avatars to match the new theme. Here are some examples (expand to view):